Paul SB

It occurred to me that the entry where R consoles a small child could be reworked into a flashback and used later. That would speed up the plot a little bit, though it would lose the empathy building that should give readers reason to care about the characters. I also went over my beat sheet to see how close the word counts match the beats to the end of Act 1. It's supposed to be around 25 kilowords, and it actually come out to 27 kilowords. Close, but there's always room to trim.

Best O'Luck and Happy Hunting!

Okay, thanks for letting me know. At my age, I can't promise to remember anything, though. And I don't have a big budget for spare brain parts ...

I'm not doing so well here. I posted, but forgot to hit the Follow Topic slider. So I posted it again, but now I can't figure out how to delete the first one. Can that be done? Sorry to bug you again. Do you know where I can buy a good used hippocampus?

Hey Rocky, watch me pull a submission out of a hat! That trick never works! Okay, this one has three entries, one where Rey further explores the ship while everyone else sleeps, one where the creepy company telepath manipulates a musician on tour, and one where the protagonists decide to have a night on the town before they go into the more serious business of crusading against slavery in the galaxy. Any suggestions are appreciated. One thing I'm looking for is if any of this material seems like it could be cut. The first entry might be okay if I can squeeze in the foreshortening elsewhere, but maybe you'll like it anyway for the ambience and the character dev. The second was one I cut from my original, 250 kiloword draft, but beta readers wanted it put back. I'd like to know what you think about it. The third kind of has to be there, as it leads into the nightmare of the next few entries. Enjoy!

It's kind of amazing how many people have read this and none of them were able to pull this out like you did, even the dev ed I paid a ton of money to. (Wife's mad about that. Money out, nothing in.)

I added this to the end of Entry 01.03, after A contemplates the problems they might face. "But another voice in my mind was already cooking up ways we could use this ship to strike back at the Meritocracy, and free more people from their Labor contracts." Does this give you a better feel for where this is going?

It sounds to me like maybe what it needs is more foreshadowing? I can't exactly reveal the ending at the beginning, but I can certainly weave in a little more sense of what they have in mind. A is very much the kind of person who wants to take on the whole galaxy. If you have ever seen an old BBC sci-fi show called "Blake's Seven" she's very similar to the protagonist of that show.

Thanks for taking a look again. I'm getting the impression that Entry 01.02 need not be there at all. That would be a bit of a shame, since the little girl and her bunkmates show up in Book 4, a year and some change later. Cutting them out of Book 1 would lessen the impact, but if it slows the story down too much, so be it. My one question for you at this point is, what would make you feel more invested in the story? Are the characters not doing it for you, or is it mainly the pacing? Suggestions?

A slot for Monday 7/14/25?

It's almost another week, and still not one bite ...

I think these two entries don't have anything in them particularly triggering. 01.03 is the major turning point of Act 1 and I hope I made it mysterious enough. 01.04 is exploration, and a bit of a hint as one of the character's otherwise hidden agenda. My question for this entry is how much of it is necessary vs. how much can be summarized. I like the exploration aspect, but maybe others will be bored by it.

I'm home from work and took a look. As far as A & J go, it's a battle scene, so they don't really have a lot of time to interact in any important way. I'm assuming there will be a denouement where they can sit back, have some iced tea and burritos, and think out loud at each other -- decompression time. Here's a few other things I saw: Chapter 36 An obsidian boulder from a trebuchet? I’ve never heard of that being done, but I imagine it would have had nasty effects when the nodule (the technical term) burst into hundreds of shards of volcanic glass. But I’m not sure how the projectile path would look any different. Is this dragon actually a hover squid? I’m not sure how slime can pull. If it’s really sticky then it would resist any effort to pull away from it, but slime doesn’t normally have muscle tissue. Taking the dragon’s head off with a saw seems mighty cruel. I’m sure it deserves it, but it kind of taints the heroes. “There’s no time! The dragon will soon be free!” If there’s no time, would he speak in complete sentences? “No time! Dragon!” “ … somehow holding the dragon’s jaws open as it tried to bring them together …” This is confusing. Is he holding it’s jaws open or trying to close them? This sounds like he’s doing both at the same time. If there is going to be a denouement after this, I hope there will be some reflection on the dragon’s motivations and feelings. It didn’t exactly get much of a speech there, and it could make for some good thoughts to ponder. “His hammer blow to the dragon’s side sent it rolling, crashing through buildings.” A sentence or two describing the noise, the sight of arcing bricks, and the clouds of dust would set the scene here. “… leaving a normal, dirty pit …” Somehow the word ‘dirty’ feels really weak here. Filth-strewn? Loathsome? Squalid? “Those still standing around her gave out a cheer.” This is a pretty anticlimactic description. “Those still standing around her burst out in an uproarious ovation.” Too many “nice.”

Frog lips! I forgot to add the number of words. It's 4903, if there's a way to add that in. How long will it be before my submission appears on the site?

Thanks for taking a look. I'm not exactly sure what you mean about identifying the dynamic. The creep is generic. That fact that creeps like this are pretty dime-a-dozen says a lot about this society. I can certainly tune him down a bit, but I thought that might remove some of the tension. Everything I've read about writing scenes says that the reaction half shouldn't be too drawn out compared to the action it starts out with. Once the priest shows up and the creep scurries away, we're in the reaction phase, which is usually mostly talk. On homophobia and the Church, there's a hint to the origin in the next chapter, where the ecclesiastical Labor says that her Old Testament quote comes from one of the ancient scriptures. Without going too deep into the history, when Earth was abandoned because pollution made it virtually uninhabitable, the wealthiest corporations made sure that only their people got off the planet. Since religion is an institution that crosscuts political or business affiliations (in this universe corporations act as governments, though fundamentally corrupt ones) naturally religion went along for the ride. But since the numbers of escapees were relatively small, it was possible for a single, syncretic faith to replace the diversity of today. More of this comes up later, mostly in later books. I recently wrote a spin-off taking place centuries earlier about how humans got FTL and the rise of the local equivalent of the Underground Railroad. Maybe I'll do another that goes into more detail about the Church. The plan is what sets the story in motion. I had hoped that the fact that the antagonists plan to use a cruise ship in their plan would get the reader immediately wondering how a bunch of slaves are going end up involved. As far as the conflict goes, in any dystopia the story dynamic is likely going to be Man versus Society (to use the standard term) to some extent, if not the primary focus. Epic, if you don't mind the scale. It will ultimately take them six books to bring it to a conclusion. The antagonists in this chapter have no reason to even consider the conflict. They are the movers and shakers of their universe, and as far as they're concerned, the sun will never set on the Meritocracy. Hopefully tomorrow I'll remember to email the next submission in instead of posting directly. What was that old song the scarecrow sang? If I only had a hippocampus ...

Thanks for the suggestions. You're probably right about taking conditions for granted. I'll see what I can do without killing the world building. Some of those capitalized words are capitalized these days when used as proper nouns, Scriptures, for one, and in a legal context the Corporate Charter of 1893 is, too. But I've had others complain about excessive capitalizations, so I'll put that on my hunt and kill list.

NBD - Like I said, I'm not exactly in a rush, though the lack of response is a bit on the frustrating side.

Okay, but so far no one has critiqued my second submission, and I only got two on the first. That and the guy who said he might be interested in publishing this is sounding less and less interested, so I probably don't need to be in any rush (except maybe to locate my carotid artery ...) I am looking forward to your latest. Personally I'm not much of a short story writer. They always come out too long. That's a disadvantage, since most people publish gobs of short stories long before anyone will even hesitate to dump their novel in the trash. I just checked my first submission and it says it's been downloaded six times, but I couldn't find how to take it down. Help, please?

It looks like I've been doin g this wrong. I was supposed to email my submissions, not post them to the site directly. My brain! Maybe it would be a good idea to start over on Monday 7/07 and resubmit my first entry, but try to do it right this time. I'll have to staple a note to my forehead.

Part of what inspired me to write this series, which I started when I was just finishing grad school, was looking around and seeing where things seem to be going, based on what I know of history and social science. Things have only gotten worse since then. One thing I do in these stories is that I show the story from several viewpoints. A and R are bunkmates in a tiny cell with four other women, and all of them get to be narrator, though A & R more than the others. When the narrator of the scene is anyone else (usually an antagonist) it gets labelled Supplementary Entry blah blah blah. It's ironic how wrong our ideas about what an alpha male is. The idea originally came from wolves, but a wolf pack is almost always a mated pair and their offspring, not a coalition of unrelated individuals. So in wolves the alpha really just means Dad. It's different in gorillas and other primates, but the thing most human get wrong is that the alpha never gets to be alpha based on his own personal strength. Alphas start out as betas and work together with other betas to kill off the alpha. BTW: the life expectancy of an alpha male gorilla is about two years after becoming alpha. They don't last long. But humans misconstrue their analogies to suit their own egos. The double Y: wait until you see the Veblen Insurance Company logo... Big people is nothing official, just the kind of descriptor you might expect from Social Darwinists. I'll have to try to make that more clear. His last regeneration ... another one I've probably done many times and didn't notice. It might also be about trying to keep my sentences from all sounding alike. This whole thing is satirical on more than one level. When we get to the end, I'll probably ask you to look again at the title page, as it contains a really big thematic clue. Corporatocracy, with a parallel religious system. I've only heard of one human society that doesn't have religion, and they were a tiny tribe of headhunters. Anything bigger than a tribe pretty well has to have some sort of religion to keep people obedient to the government. In this future there is no actual government, but with corporations acting in its place, they still need a coercive moral code to keep their workers from striking, if not outright lynching their leaders. Thanks again, and I'm looking forward to your thoughts on my next submission.

Sorry it took me a while to get back to you. I've had lots of medical appointments recently, and I've been very tired. Thanks a bunch for taking a look. I'll have to go back and look at the instructions again. I have a misfiring pineal gland, which messes with my ability to sleep, and that in turn jacks my short-term memory. I'm getting to the point where I need to start stapling reminders to my forehead because I forget that I wrote reminders. I probably start a lot of chapters with dialogue. I thought that by going straight into dialogue I would avoid the temptation to describe too much. The first draft of this story was around 250,000 words, and I've hacked it down to just over 100 Kwords over the years. I've been told that as an unpublished author you don't have a prayer with a manuscript that's even one letter over 100,000. I'll see what I can do about that. The creep is a throw-away character who's there to illustrate the dystopia, so I didn't think he needed much in the way of personality. Any suggestions to keep your interest going at that point? The same-sex thing is foreshadowing. However, the guy who said he was interested in possibly publishing this story was not too happy with the fact that all sexualities are not normalized in this future. It's a dystopia, so why would it be? Corporations wouldn't normally have any reason to care. They just want everyone else's money. But humans don't do societies without religions, and religions thrive on scapegoating. Any suggestions on keeping the momentum up in the strategy meeting? It's a meeting, so not much physical is likely to happen (in the third book someone sets off a bomb at a board meeting, but that's not typical). I hoped the whole set up to flush out competitors and their spies would be sufficiently intriguing.

Chapter 35 “… when the sun became a painter …” Great imagery! No mythology here? The idea of a sun god changing personality through the day the way people change from birth to death could be fun to play with. “Nope. it wasn’t going to pursue that line of thought.” Just a typo. (It) “Then she leaned back … Then she leaned forward again.” Maybe don’t repeat then so close. “She leaned forward again.” “ … she said ‘attack our rear’ and I didn’t even CRACK a single joke …” tee hee. No self-satisfied smirk for that one? “… making wide slashes across town.” What was the source of these shadows? Mountains? Huge buildings? It would help to give us an image here. “… screwed up the curse’s rhythm, which was a relief?” How is that a relief? Is it happening less often? When a pain is predictable it is actually less hurtful than if it’s unpredictable. This was demonstrated first with rats in the 1960s, then with humans in the ‘90s. Amara’s obsession with appearing weak sounds like a very important psychosocial problem that could use some solid examination. Doe sit relate to her being female in a patriarchy, or do the local cultures maintain caveman standards? Both? Was there a time when not being strong enough had some huge impact on her, or someone she cared about? I hope you explore this in here somewhere. That final conversation was really good stuff, and I like the fact that it ended with no resolution. (And it reminds me of the old Oingo Boingo song “Skin.”) This talk should be a major ice-breaker for both of them, and lead to both more trust and more opening up to each other. It might be good if Jean (does he pronounce that the French way?) at some point after being praised for his kindness and reliability, tell Amara that she must be a very good judge of character. It’s a compliment that might help open the door to cutting down on the self-criticism and reframe her self ideation.

Oh frog lips! I forgot I was supposed to include a summary of the previous submission. Okay, here goes: Entry 01.01 - Our protagonist, Amal Hardesty meets with her friend Rey Maxton in a tucked away corner of the interstellar cruise liner that owns them. They discuss a contact Rey made who claims to be able to safely remove the cyanide capsule that the company implants in the necks of all their labor to prevent them from jumping ship. The contact arrives with a nanotechnology device which he offers to allow them and their bunkmates to use in exchange for sex. The protagonist tries to make non-sexual counter offers to no avail, until another of their bunkmates arrives with the ship's priest, and the creep quietly slinks away. Supplemental Entry 022TRG1//-001 - At the headquarters of the most powerful corporation in the Meritocracy, the president meets with his security chief and the company psion to discuss a plan to gather intelligence from competitors. They have an alien artifact that can enhance telepathic powers, but instead of just having the psion go around reading the minds of enemy executives, he decides to put it on display on a cruise ship, where it will attract agents from many competitors, who the psion can read and kill.